Female enterprise on a transnational border: the entrepreneurial agency of an East Icelandic businesswoman, Pálína Waage (1864–1935)

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to contribute to the historical discussion of women entrepreneurs. It demonstrates that in Iceland, historical research on this theme has been scarce. The special focus of this article is to analyse the entrepreneurial agency of an East Icelandic female businesswoman, Pálína Waage (1864–1935), against this background. Based on her autobiography, diaries, and other local accounts, we analyse Pálína’s work and life trajectory in the context of the transnational town of Seyðisfjörður where she operated. We propose that Pálína possessed, in her local context, social and symbolic capital as an entrepreneur, as understood by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. However, Pálína’s subject and agency has been silenced by factors such as the restricted financial authority of married women at the time, sociohistorical data, and the masculine discursive formation of the term ‘entrepreneur’ in the Icelandic context. It is proposed that Pálína’s female entrepreneurial agency was transgressive given these historical circumstances. It is also suggested that local history may help make entrepreneurial subjects, such as Pálína, visible. However, the question of whether Icelandic national history and the history of women and gender offer such possibilities is a topic for future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Female entrepreneurs
• agency
• social capital
• transnationalism
• East Iceland

1–5 JEL-CODES:

• a13
• relation of Economics to social values
• b54
• feminist Economics

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For micro-historical research on 19th-century and early 20th-century Iceland, see Magnússon (1997).

2 Historian Guðmundur Jónsson furthermore wrote (1995) that ‘Legislation from 1872, which banned foreigners’ fishing and fish processing in the fishing limits and on land, did not define the concept of ‘foreigner’ (p. 75). Foreign men [icl. utanríkismenn], who announced themselves as in residence in the country and paid municipal taxes, were thus not regarded as foreigners by the authorities and were allowed to fish undisturbed within the territorial waters.

3 The parish of Seyðisfjörður was the parish of Dvergasteinn (Dvergasteinssókn) until about 1890 and the parish of Vestdalseyri (Vestdalseyrarsókn) until 1938.

4 In 1840, there were 155 people living in Seyðisfjörður on 13 farms around the fjord. By 1900, the population had become 1,164 people.

5 For statistical information on the development of sailing to Iceland and vessels entering Icelandic ports in the period from 1785 to 1936, see Jónsson and Magnússon (1997, pp. 566–568).

6 To better understand how these concepts have been used within the Icelandic context, we conducted a search on the digital library timarit.is, which contains most Icelandic newspapers and periodicals. We found that the concepts of entrepreneur (athafnamaður) and entrepreneurship (athafnasemi) in the masculine, feminine and various other inflection word forms reflect a gendered use of these concepts.

7 On women‘s history and the construction of femininity in Iceland in the 19th and early 20th centuries, see, for example, Halldórsdóttir (2011) and Matthíasdóttir (2004).

8 This information is taken from a biographical account on three typed pages about Pálína Waage, under the heading ‘Pálína S. Guðmundsdóttir Ísfeld og fjölskylda’. It was written in Seyðisfjörður in 2005 by Sólveig Sigurðardóttir on the request of Pálína Waage the Younger, Pálína Waage’s granddaughter.

9 It is not clear who this man was.

10 Stangeland might have been a fisher, most likely Norwegian. See Sæmundsson (1911), p. 91.

Additional information

Funding

Hagþenkir. The Association of Non-fiction and Educational Writers in Iceland; Starfslaunasjóður. Independent Scholars’ Salary Fund.